Photo courtesy of
www.biodieselcommunity.org

The Appleseed Biodiesel Processor is a water heater based processor made popular by Maria "Girl Mark" Alovert, through the internet and her nationwide workshop tours where she teaches making biodiesel using the Appleseed reactor design. Her course material eventually turned into an ezine that Girl Mark publishes herself. Her book Biodiesel Homebrew Guide is available through her web site.

Like so many of the world's greatest inventions, Girl Mark drew her original design on the back of a napkin at a coffeehouse as a project for an East Bay (California) Biodiesel Internship she was teaching with Jennifer Radtke of Biofuel Oasis and Backyardbiodiesel.org. While assembling the first water heater-based processor as part of the course, Girl Mark and a number of the students, including Amber Crowley, worked out some of the kinks in the design.

The Classic Appleseed reactor is a no welding required processor that is easy to assemble from locally acquired materials. It was made popular by Maria "Girl Mark" Alovert in her whirlwind of nationwide workshops. It took nearly four years to fine tune the original and come up with this layout. It's the same layout that was used in the popular B100 Supply Kit.

In this version the only part that may be difficult to find locally is the bimetallic thermometer and it can be found on the internet at most of the biodiesel equipment supply web sites. The plumbing should be made out of black pipe, but galvanized will do in a pinch. Brass ball valves are good, just make sure the ball on the inside is made out of metal. Some of the cheaper ones are metal plated plastic balls.

New Water Heaters

Your local hardware or appliance store will have a water heater that will work for you.

The requirements are:

1. Electric
2. Hot and Cold water Inlets on the top of the tank.
3. Screw-in type water heater elements

Water heaters are rated "to deliver", so a 40 gallon hot water heater will deliver 40 gallons. It will "contain" about 10% less than it can deliver. Add to that the fact that we need to leave some room for our methoxide and we can estimate the maximum batch size you can make in a particular water heater.

Wiring is one place you don't want to take chances. If you have questions, the best authority is a good electrician who knows the local codes and can look at your wiring to make sure everything is safe. Individual installations vary and this post cannot cover every situation. So a local electrician is a good resource for making sure you have wired everything to code and in the safest possible manner.

There are two goals we consider when making control panels for our Appleseed processors. Safety and Automation. We will cover Safety first, then Automation, then show some examples of control panels that offer both Safety and Automation.

The scariest thing that can happen when operating an Appleseed is for it to catch fire inside the tank. This happens when the heating element is activated while uncovered. The heating element depends on having a fluid covering it to carry away the heat. If it is not covered then it will over heat and burn out in a condition called "dry firing". When an element dry fires, it will often melt a portion of the element making it useless. It also gets hot enough to ignite the methanol in the tank. This will send smoke and flames out the vent and can spray you down with biodiesel.

I wanted to see how different people loaded oil into their processors, so I ran a thread on infopop. I also found a few other methods in various places on the internet. Here is the results of that effort.

Pour it in:

WVO can be poured or gravity fed into the tank. Simply connect a hose and hose barb to a carboy lid. Connect the other end to the drain valve. Screw the carboy lid onto your 5 gallon carboy and pour the oil into the tank.